Manipulating a data file with some sort of Macro

[taldridg2]

If anyone could help it would be great. I am currently working on a dat
collection project dealing with strain data from a bridge. I downloa
the data via a datalogger in a comma delimiated format. Each item i
the data set has its own value. Lets say I have 65 strain gages tha
are collecting data and I record every 10 minutes and download once
week. Thats 655200 data points a week. Needless to say, the excel shee
gets very large very quickly. In the past others have opened eac
downloaded data set and manually copied the data from a particular gag
and created a file that only contains information for that gage. So eac
week they had to copy and paste into 65 different files.

My question is, is there anyway to create a macro to help. Lets say..
Converting the comma format to columns, then picking out a certai
column and copying the data from that column and inserting it into
file that has already been created to store data from that gage ever
week. This would require that the data be inserted at the bottom of th
data that has already been included in that created file. If this coul
be done it would cut out a lot of data processing work for us students


Thanks for any help you could give

 

[Myrna Larson]

Yes, a macro can be written for this, but to do so requires SPECIFIC
information about the layout of the original text file, the criteria for
identifying a gauge, the number of columns of data, the names of the workbooks
to which it is to be copied, etc.

Perhaps you should be using a database program like Access for this. It's much
better at handling large data sets, and would allow you to more easily do any
calculations that require data from more than one gauge, etc. You can also
import into Excel data that results from an Access query, in order to do more
complicated calculations.